How Dashing!

I gave a pop quiz yesterday on Dickinson’s use of the word “Wednesday” in her poetry; HERE. 

Surprise, surprise – I have another pop quiz for you today:


Who said, “Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all”?

A. Clement Clarke Moore
B. Saint Nicholas
C. Ellie May Clampett (about Dash Riprock)
D. Emily Dickinson


Well, I’ll accept both A and B as correct answers, but maybe I should give partial credit to those who chose D as the answer since the quoted line seems to sum up Dickinson’s style of punctuation?

Are you familiar with the various types of dashes – the hyphen, the en dash, nd the em dash?

I stumbled across this gentleman on Reels the other day, and he sums up the three types of dashes rather neatly. 

Click the image at the right to view the video.

So which dash did Dickinson use? 

Well, I checked her draft of “This is my letter to the world,” and then I took a look at the poem in various editions and on various sites to see how editors depicted her dashes.  See below. 

The first pic is the poem in Dickinson’s own handwriting.

The second pic is how the poem was represented in the first ever edition of Dickinson's poems in 1890.

The next three pics show how the poem with its dashes was printed in the Johnson (1960), the Franklin (1998), and the Miller (2016) editions of Dickinson’s poetry (click the images to enlarge). 

The final pic shows the poem as it was represented on six randomly chosen web sites (click the image to enlarge).

Back to today's pop quiz on who said "“Now dash away! Dash away! Dash away all”?
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I think I'll give full credit to anyone who wrote in "Mrs. Dash" as the answer too!